I recently found out that our beloved cat Stella had a BB gun pellet inside her abdomen. Since I adopted her when she was one year old, which was in 2016, that means she was shot at while still a street cat in Santa Cruz – a little kitten who had already given birth herself.
Much to our heartbreak, Stella died last week, following an aggressive three-week battle with what we learned at the very end was squamous cell carcinoma, which had metastasized to her lymph nodes, her skull, and her brain. To tell you the truth, we are still coming up for air, still shaken to our core about the death of someone who had so recently been thriving.
It was an X-ray that she received in her last week of life that is how we learned about the pellet. And when her cremated remains come back home, perhaps her bullet will be included.
Lately, in between the thises-and-that I’ve been doing as an unsuccessful attempt to distract from the sadness, her bullet has come to mind. I remember little tiny Stella, a skinny slip of a thing, being brought into my tiny downtown Santa Cruz studio apartment. She had clearly just weened her kittens, and she spent those first few days presumably looking for them, including behind the refrigerator, where she’d meow and meow while searching around frantically. Heartbreaking, really.
And to think that there was a BB pellet inside her the whole time. It sat like a cold, hard lump inside her small, furry body, the rest of her organs somehow finding a way to do their job of keeping her alive despite the interruption.
As she became a fuller cat, maybe too full at times, there was a bullet inside her. As she gained more confidence to ask for what she needed, there was a bullet inside her.
It was a time when I, too, needed confidence. Life had thrown me some curveballs — or I guess I threw them, if we’re being real — and I officially adopted Stella, a somewhat planned “foster fail,” on my 37th birthday.
There were beautiful parts of my life then — the jagged coastline, the fascinating microclimates, the old wooden roller coaster, the new anonymity I carried with me like a hot potato. But it was a time that was incredibly painful, too, and many nights were spent in the fetal position replaying my life’s regrets on repeat in my head despite my pathetic attempts to shake it off.
Stella was there for all of it, and I realize now that so was her bullet. I don’t know if it’s poetic or loathsome (maybe both) that we were each battling our own inner-hard parts, though she with more grace and resilience.
Santa Cruz was a complicated place. I lived on Elm Street, a tall ask for a superstitious child of the 80s. And even though my office was geographically nearby, getting there required a zig-zag route each morning. One block south of my home was to be avoided due to homeless encampments and a shelter. Shortly after moving in and getting Stella, we watched in horror as someone threw two hyperbaric needles over the fence and into my private yard.
The town filled with tourists in the summertime, including weekenders from the Bay Area who wanted a beach getaway. Santa Cruz, though relatively close by, felt uniquely cut off from the Bay Area, thanks in large part to the Santa Cruz Mountains creating a significant natural barrier. The winding and narrow Highway 17, the primary route connecting Santa Cruz to Oakland and San Francisco, could be challenging to navigate, especially during inclement weather or heavy traffic. At one point, a dramatic post-storm mudslide cut off all traffic for weeks, while in the other direction, Big Sur had also shut down the iconic Highway 1. Santa Cruz was its own world, and I always felt like a Martian.
Eventually, that feeling of being cut off got the best of me. So Stella and I loaded up a UHaul and drove down to Los Angeles into another tiny studio, this one in Hollywood. The move terrified Stella, who stayed in the closet for a week. I tried to lure her out with every treat I could find at the nearby pet store, but she was in full boycott mode. By the time she reluctantly emerged, I had already set up the place, which had an entire wall of windows for her to explore. It faced a parking lot, but it was still beautiful, and I had high hopes for what this new city could do for me. Prior to moving to California, I had spent nearly 20 years in Manhattan, with a short stint in Brooklyn. I was a big-city person, and upon entering LA, I could feel myself beginning to inflate again.
Los Angeles was good to Stella and me. As friends would come over, Stella, once super-shy, began to approach them of her own volition, at first apprehensively and then with a fierce resolve. By the time we moved to nearby Koreatown, into Moore’s apartment, Stella was ready to conquer anything. Lucy Dog didn’t know what to make of her new cat sibling, but the two eventually found a rhythm, and we all became a funny little family.
And yet, buried deep inside Stella was a bullet I didn't know about — a tangible remnant of the violent Santa Cruz streets. The area had always had a rough edge, but I had never imagined the true extent of the danger. One morning, about a year after I’d moved, I opened Facebook only to find that my neighbor, with whom I used to share some evenings drinking wine on her patio, had been found murdered by two young homeless people she had taken in. I felt sick learning of the news, and I instinctually glanced over at Stella, wondering what other darkness she might have witnessed in her life before me.
We all have hard parts, painful moments from our past that we cannot fully release, and so we grow and form around them. For me, those hard parts were becoming the bedrock of my resilience.
As for my resilient little cat, her own hardships etched in the silent depth of her eyes — she, too, carried her buried fragments, a quiet testament to her journey. Would she have been different if she hadn’t been shot, if her life had been free of such violence? Was her fierce spirit a direct result of her trials?
And what about me? How much of my own evolution was carved by the adversities I faced? I think back to those painful nights in Santa Cruz, Stella by my side as time moved too slowly and the weight of the past seemed unbearable. In those moments, our shared struggles became a source of quiet strength, binding us together in a way only shared hardship can. Through it all, we had shaped each other, finding in our connection a profound sense of healing and purpose.
In Koreatown, a man in an expensive-looking suit knocked on our door to tell us he had bought our building and it was going to be demolished, and we were forced to move. Stella was technically living with us illegally because when Moore had tried to contact her landlord when we moved in, she hadn’t received a reply; it turns out the landlord, an old lady, was dying, hence the radio silence. But since we were in breach of the lease, Moore was not given the $10,000 payout she would have received had they known about Stella. We tried to fight it, but the fight became too onerous. Eventually, we moved to the eclectic gayborhood that is West Hollywood and were quite pleased to learn that the slimy investor had run into some red tape and never wound up demolishing the building. (Asshole.)
Stella, a solid black cat save for a tiny white poof on the top of her chest, looked the part in our white mid-century modern one-bedroom where Elvis’s girlfriend once resided. That was fitting, since just a few months prior, Moore and I had eloped in Vegas, Elvis performing the nuptials after we went down the aisle in a pink Caddy, our dog Lucy in our arms. We soon adopted two old chihuahuas, George and Birdie, and laughed as Stella made a game of (gently) bopping them when they were least expecting it. By now, she was a self-assured queen, much like the other queens that filled up the streets of our colorful and vibrant neighborhood.
In our West Hollywood apartment, we transformed what had been a shoe closet into my infinitesimal office, which I also shared with Stella’s litterbox — the only option, since the dogs had the unfortunate habit of eating the litter if it was available to them.
We were there when COVID hit, Moore now suddenly working from home too, and it soon became apparent that our adorable apartment no longer suited our needs. We wanted to move back east, but we couldn’t for the life of us figure out how to get ourselves, our three dogs, and Stella safely across the country during the height of the pandemic. Eventually, we decided the best way for Stella to travel would be for us to rent an RV. Hotels really weren’t an option, and there was absolutely no way we would get on a plane and put our family in the luggage compartment. I mean, come on.
In the months leading up to the move, I had nightmares about Stella escaping the RV somewhere in the Midwest, unable to find her way back to us. So I obsessed over every logistical detail, terrified about putting a cat in a situation like that.
And yet, when we were finally in the vehicle with the animals all safe in their car seats and whatnot, it became evident that sweet Stella was basically made for life on the road. I searched the hashtag #catinanrv, but hardly anything came up; she was breaking new ground. We had put a full-size cat tree in the middle of the RV, resulting in us awkwardly stepping around it anytime we had to get anywhere. We set up her litterbox on the loft above the driver, and while we were on the road, we gave her a giant enclosure with food and toys. Our girl was set. My fear that she’d try to make a run for it wound up being far from true; she was in heaven.
After a year-long stop in the northern foothills of the Catskills to house-hunt in Vermont and in Western New York, we landed in Rochester, where Stella thrived in our home. The hundred-year-old house is relatively small, but to a cat who had spent the majority of her life in studio apartments, it was a mansion. She grew older with grace, swapping out the zoomies for leisurely long naps in sun spots or one of the many cat trees. We lost our sweet Birdie and Lucy (George keeps on ticking, despite being 17) and adopted Louise, Herbert, and Murray. The new animal dynamic was more complicated than it had previously been, and Stella started to hang out more and more in the basement, away from the dogs. We hired an animal behaviorist, and Moore and I created a living space down there. Soon, we started to foster a cat we named Stanley so that Stella would have company when we were elsewhere.
But by the time she decided to hang out downstairs, she started sleeping more and more and eating less and less. In those final weeks, I would hold her on my lap — she had gotten too thin, nearly half the weight she had been at her prime — and I’d pet her with her favorite glove. Stella purred, despite clearly not feeling well. Thus began vet appointment after vet appointment. During one such visit, as our vet is an at-home one, I said, “I think it’s a brain tumor.” There was no specific reason I would have known that, but as it turned out, the cancer had spread to her brain, and my suspicion was not far off.
We took her to the animal hospital for the final time just three days before we had to say goodbye. She wasn’t eating or drinking, and any blended food we tried to feed her with a syringe just fell right out of her mouth. On the day they told us the diagnosis, and it was clear that she was not going to get any better, we sat with Stella in what the hospital called “The Rainbow Room” and wept. She was our girl. She was my baby. I didn’t understand what life would look like on the other side of Jazz and Stella. I wasn’t ready for this; she was only nine.
But that’s how it sometimes goes with these little darlings. Anyone who has ever had and lost an animal companion knows that all too well. We love them with everything we have, and we mourn them with everything we have, too. Their legacy becomes part of the fabric of our being, and our memories of the years and years together become central to our worldview.
It was the vet at that last hospital who told us about the bullet Stella had lodged inside her abdomen for all these years. The news was shocking to me, as it would be to anyone.
“Someone shot a little kitten,” I said to Moore. “They shot at Stella.”
“And she lived,” replied Moore. “She survived it.”
I was planning on writing this Substack about how easy it is for people to discard entire individual lives for their own pleasure or profit. I was going to talk about how senseless and abhorrent violence like this toward society’s most vulnerable creatures is and how readily we brush off violence against animals. I was going to talk about how truly bananas it is to me to think that we came this close to a world without Stella before she even had a chance. I was going to talk about the mentally ill person who did that to her — and how quickly we brush aside mental illness, too, not offering the care to those who need it most, to those who would injure someone so senselessly, to someone who shot a kitten.
I was going to tell you that a few days after Stella died, I received an early-morning text from a heroic woman who runs a dog rescue saying that a 16-year-old chihuahua with a bum leg, no teeth, and brittle skin from a flea infestation was being held by another hero, an animal care officer who refused to send this dog to a shelter, knowing he’d be immediately euthanized. The text asked if we’d take the dog in as a “fospice” situation, which is when you foster an old and/or sick animal for the remainder of their life, effectively providing them hospice. I was going to tell you about how we had Pietro just a few hours later, a six-pound nugget who has become a bright light for us during an especially dark time. I was going to tell you about how the animal care officer who handed him over said his family had been abusive, that he was likely dropped and broke his leg many years ago, but it was never treated, and so it never healed correctly. Pietro has been walking around with a bum leg for years now, dragging it behind him without a second thought. Someone dropped him, then ignored him, then discarded him.
And yet Pietro somehow has the verve of a puppy, moving so quickly I can hardly keep up with him. His leg broke, but his spirit prevailed. Something that undoubtedly created massive pain and turmoil transformed him into the fierce little protector he is now, the funny little guy with whom everyone in our household immediately became enamored. He’s yet another example, one of billions and billions and billions, of how easy it is to hurt individuals and then not give it a second thought. He’s also another example, one of billions and billions and billions, of how much every individual life matters. Pietro matters. Stella mattered. Every single animal who is discarded matters. Their thoughts matter. Their families matter. Their feelings matter. Their pain, and their healing, matters.
I was going to tell you about all of that, but instead, I told you about Stella, a cat who changed my life from the minute she entered it. A cat who I found but who really found me. A cat who I saved but who really saved me. A cat who lived an entire life, even though someone tried to cut it short.
In her last moments, as I held her close, I realized that the bullet inside her was more than just a piece of metal. It was a symbol of the resilience and love that defined her. Stella taught me that we can endure and thrive despite the wounds we carry. Her legacy lives on in the strength she showed and the love she gave, reminding me that even the hardest parts of our past can lead to the most profound connections and the deepest compassion, if we let it.
People systemically and regularly discard others — animals and humans alike — without so much as a second thought, not realizing the powerful impact each life holds. Stella’s journey, from being a discarded street cat to a beloved family member, underscores the resilience and worth of every individual. And now, as we welcome Pietro, a tiny chihuahua with his own scars and story, I'm reminded again of the incredible strength and love that exists within those who have been discarded.
Stella’s spirit lives on in the love we continue to give and receive, in the lives we touch and are touched by, showing us that every life, no matter its past, is precious and capable of remarkable transformation.
My dog has a scar on her leg from before I adopted her, and I wonder every time she tries to attack a bicycle or gets bossy with other dogs if that’s the reason why. Now that she’s 10 years old, it’s like a white hair appears in place of a black one every day, yet that scar never changes. Thank you for sharing Stella’s (and Pietro’s) story ❤️
dear jasmin,
this is beautiful: "Stella’s spirit lives on in the love we continue to give and receive, in the lives we touch and are touched by, showing us that every life, no matter its past, is precious and capable of remarkable transformation."
i love you and i love stella!
love
myq